Is Photography dead? asks Peter Plagens. To me this sounds a lot like the wingeing that other old school journalists do about journalism:

Yet wandering the galleries of these two shows, you can’t help but wonder if the entire medium hasn’t fractured itself beyond all recognition. Sculpture did the same thing a while back, so that now “sculpture” can indicate a hole in the ground as readily as a bronze statue. Digitalization has made much of art photography’s vast variety possible. But it’s also a major reason that, 25 years after the technology exploded what photography could do and be, the medium seems to have lost its soul. Film photography’s artistic cachet was always that no matter how much darkroom fiddling someone added to a photograph, the picture was, at its core, a record of something real that occurred in front of the camera. A digital photograph, on the other hand, can be a Photoship fairy tale, containing only a tiny trace of a small fragment of reality. By now, we’ve witnessed all the magical morphing and seen all the clever tricks that have turned so many photographers - formerly bearers of truth - into conjurers of fiction. It’s hard to say “gee whiz” anymore.

We can’t decide what it is any more, so it’s dead dead dead. Broken anyway. (By the way, I think sculpture has got a lot better lately.)

But Plagens does have half a point. Real Photographers do have a real problem. In their glory days, they could just take a thousand snaps and pick the best, or set up one really great shot, take half a dozen, ditto, and be confident that the Billion Monkeys couldn’t follow them, because we hardly existed. But now, to try to separate themselves from the simian hoards, they resort to the Photoshop trickery that Plagens describes, which we Billion Monkeys mostly can’t be bothered with. Most of us prefer to have a record of something real, thank you very much. (But, those of us who like to get all artistic and play games with Photoshop can be scarily good at that too!)

Photography is not dead. It is alive and kicking. Kicking people like Peter Plagens actually, wedded as he is to “art” photography, with all its shows and galleries and related palaver. Time was when people like Plagens could shape the history of photography by simply announcing where photography was going in their old school columns and their glossily illustrated books devoted exclusively to Real Photographers. Now, this history has taken on a life of its own, and Plagens can only watch helplessly. It is his life and work that has been sidelined, that has “lost its soul”, not photography itself.

I say “gee whiz” frequently, about half the time at one of my own photos. But that’s because my preferred photographers (who include me) keep art at arms length, and instead photo things that are interesting. Simple really.